Dark Stain Read Online Free Page B

Self-defense, murder, self-defense, murder, no, yes, no, yes, NO, YES. He lit a cigarette and observed his trembling fingers as if they belonged to somebody else. He had to clear his head, he had to think straight. But what was there to think about? He had been cleared. Tomorrow morning, the D.A. would clear him again. But who would clear him with Mrs. Randolph, with the Negroes? The hell with them, he cursed. They were prejudiced, blind, emotional. Why kill himself with worry as to what they thought? He wasn’t a wild-eyed fanatic to break his heart over them. The hell with them. They hated him. He didn’t hate them but they would never believe him. Unseeingly, he glanced up the avenue. The red, blue and green neons were darkened; it was the time of the dim-out, of war in the land. He passed corner taverns; inside, men, soldiers and sailors among them, leaned on the bars and drank beer and whiskey. He wondered if he ought to get drunk. To get good and soused and so stinking drunk that he would forget Mrs. Randolph. Candy stores glowed yellow; the stone churches showed no light. All about him the city ticked through the night, its people like a multitude of clock hands marking the minutes to some midnight hours. Two girls and two sailors laughed together on a corner; a skinny man paraded a big solemn police dog; a boy studied the black window of a rummage shop. And by tomorrow noon, the second hearing would be finished business. Cynically he told himself that he would be cleared even if he had shot down Randolph in cold blood. “If I could only forget,” he said to himself. Forget? How? One by one, the white witnesses stepped forward inside his brain. One by one, they testified for the dozenth time … “They held me,” the ambulance driver said. “I wanted to go help Miller but a gang held me back. They let me go when Randolph started for Seventh Avenue. I ran for help. I picked up a car and we picked up O’Riordan — ” The ambulance driver vanished and the white face speaking in Sam’s brain now was O’Riordan’s. “I hit his left hand. I kept on hitting his left hand — ” The white face was his own face. “I didn’t want to shoot him. I kept telling him to drop his knife but he wouldn’t. I tried my best to save — ”
    MURDERER, the crowd challenged him on the lonely avenue. Sam flinched. His lips moved, addressing silent words to them. Their accusations thundered. The mouths of the Negro witnesses shouted inside of him. “When I saw Mister Randolph his head was just all bloody and bleeding and he was helpless — ” “He was carrying no knife. Those two officers men, they didn’t have to shoot him — ” “They kept hitting him and cursing him — ” “Officer Miller, he pulled out his gun and said: ‘I’ll get that black bastard’ and the other officer said: ‘Why don’t you?’ and Officer Miller — ”
    He walked with a host. The crowd tramped behind him in its thousands, the dead man walked, the dead man with eyebrows plastered with blood. “Damn,” Sam breathed. He had done his duty. This God damned Harlem, he cursed and then his rage was gone. God, if only they knew about him. Again, he was offering the facts of his life as evidence in the hearing transpiring inside his conscience. If only they knew that he had given money to help the Scottsboro boys and signed petitions when he had been in college to abolish the poll tax. Wasn’t that proof? What better proofs could there be? But it proved nothing. He had killed a Negro and all the Negro eyewitnesses with
no
exception believed him a killer. The P.D. would knock holes in their testimony and throw a searchlight on the contradictions but the fact remained that the Negroes would be against him. It wasn’t only the crowd. All Harlem would be against him. All? No, not all. There was his old friend, Johnny Ellis. Sam stopped in the middle of the street as if he had actually bumped into Johnny. He recalled the way Johnny smiled, the